No, I think that a great many, if not “most” people who don’t vote Democratic do so because they don’t like what the Democratic party offers — not because they are deeply conservative.
Also, the messaging that is in the “mainstream” news is not as rational as what the author lays out. It is often polemic but in a carefully constructed way so that it does not appear to be. It often focuses on one side of an issue without explaining the other side except to parody it.
For example, most non-Democrats believe that much of global warming is anthropogenic, but they are not convinced that it is the huge crisis that the mainstream news and Left claim it to be. The sea is rising at 3mm/year, and that does not sound scary to the non-Democratic voters; but the news media makes it sound like we are all going to die suddenly at some point this century. We are not. There will be regions that become less livable, but other regions will become more livable. It will be disruptive. It will be costly. And yes, some people will even die. But the issue is not existential.
Other issues have nuances too, but the “mainstream” press does not give those nuances fair time. They use labels such as “denier” and “XYZ-phobe” and “racist” for people who merely don’t want rapid cultural change — notice I said “rapid”, and that is important because everyone knows that culture changes over time, but the flood of illegal immigration is a problem of scale: it is too much. People who want immigration controlled are not racist.
The author makes yet another attempt to claim that “anyone who does not vote liberal is misguided”. It is not true. I have liberal values — I grew up in the NY area. But I don’t buy into the extreme slant of the mainstream news, and I didn’t like the most recent Democratic presidential candidate. Democrats need to stop “shifting Left” and listen to the actual concerns of mainstream conservatives — not the rich Right like Koch and their ilk, but middle America. They have legitimate concerns. If you live in Montana, it is not practical to not have a gun. If you live in central Illinois, the only jobs are at Walmart. If you work in IT on the East Coast, the abuse of the H1B visa program was giving all the IT jobs to non-citizens. These are things that the Democrats did not acknowledge during in 2016. They need to open their eyes.
